The Connie Willis . Net Blog

WEBSITE UPDATE–EASTER AND BEN-HUR–4-4-21

EASTER MOVIES

For Easter weekend we’ve been eating deviled eggs (not Peeps because they have to get stale first to be really good) and watching BEN-HUR.  We watched the 1959 Charlton Heston version and then the silent film.

I read the book long ago, and it was terrific.  You may not know this, but it was written by General Lew Wallace, a Union Civil War general, and it out-sold even UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.  It had several stage productions and continued to be the top-selling American novel right up till GONE WITH THE WIND.  I remember loving the book, though some of you may find the style sort of old-fashioned and difficult to read.  I especially loved the fact that the wise men were portrayed as actual people, with lives of their own, and that Balthazar was a major character in the novel.

Lew Wallace said the book was inspired by a talk he had had with an agnostic on a train one day, a talk in which the agnostic knew far more than he did about the Bible.  He was humiliated by his own ignorance and decided to learn as much as he could about the Bible, and set out to do tons of research on Biblical history, which really shows in the book (especially in a time when people pretty much played fast and loose with historical facts.)

His research turned into the novel, BEN-HUR, A TALE OF THE CHRIST, and it tells the story of Jesus from the point of view of a Jewish nobleman who  falls afoul of the Roman Empire and who encounters Jesus when he is a prisoner on his way to certain death in a Roman galley.   It started the fashion of books told from the point-of-view of a peripheral character, books like THE ROBE (from the point-of-view of one of the soldiers who gambled for Christ’s robe as he was dying on the Cross) and THE SILVER CHALICE (from the point-of-view of the Roman slave who made the cup used at the Last Supper) and eventually led to an onslaught of books and movies from somebody other than the main character’s point-of-view:  the Wicked Witch of the East (WICKED), Elizabeth Bennet’s silly mother (MRS. BENNET HAS HER SAY), the Big Bad Wolf (THE TRUE STORY OF THE THREE LITTLE PIGS), to say nothing of MALEFICENT and the upcoming CRUELLA.  Nearly all of these are terrible, but occasionally somebody–like Tom Stoppard with ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (from the point-of-view of the two lackeys charged with killing Hamlet but who end up murdered themselves–gets it right, and Ben-Hur is one of those times.

Using a peripheral character is a great way to tell a story that everybody has strong opinions about, and BEN-HUR’s obliqueness (and the powerful plot of betrayal and revenge and redemption) is the reason why it’s the best of all the Bible-themed movies, except for LIFE OF BRIAN (which also tells the story from a different angle) and GODSPELL (which sets the story in the hippie 1960s and adds musical numbers and tap-dancing.)  Movies like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and SAMSON AND DELILAH and especially KING OF KINGS are virtually unwatchable, but BEN-HUR remains a really good movie, in spite of the nearly three-hour length and the on-the-nose dialogue (helped some by Gore Vidal’s and Christopher Fry’s work on the script.)
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Even though it kills me to say it, Charlton Heston does a really good job as Judah Ben-Hur, which is critical since he as to carry long stretches of the movie all by himself, and the movie tells a really moving story and has a killer ending.  The chariot race–which is pretty spectacular–gets all the attention, and there’s a bloody sea battle, but the really powerful scenes are the personal ones, and some of the actors are wonderful–Hugh Griffiths as the Arab who races a team of horses named after stars–Rigel, Aldebaran, Altair, and Antares (which delighted my teen-aged science-fiction self) and Jack Hawkins as the only decent Roman in the bunch and Israeli actress Haya Harareet as Esther, who’s my favorite character and who, unlike in any other sword-and-sandals Bible epic,  is the smartest person in the room and the moral center of the movie.  I cried at the ending, even though I knew what was coming, just as I cried at the end of the book, which pretty much tells you how I feel about it.

After we watched the 1959 BEN-HUR, we watched the 1925 silent version, which was not as good–the plot has some holes and Esther is unaccountably played by someone who looks exactly like Mary Pickford, blonde long curls and all–but I for one think the chariot race is better than the one in the 1959 movie.  The rumor is that one of the cameramen was killed while filming it, and, watching it, that’s easy to believe.

Anyway, I recommend watching both–1959 first and then the silent–and I also recommend watching GODSPELL and LIFE OF BRIAN.

And, whatever  you watch, have a happy Easter and a blessed Passover!

Connie Willis

This week was a great week for science-related news.

First, a new nova was spotted in the constellation Cassiopeia. (This is not the one I’ve been pulling for all year–Betelgeuse in Orion–but a brand-new one that was found.) It was spotted by accident by a Japanese amateur astronomer, Yuji Nakamura, who saw a star where there shouldn’t be one in the northern sky. It was near the W-shaped (or, right now, chair-shaped) constellation Cassiopeia, and, as the nights went by, it seemed to grow brighter.

Nakamura spotted it through a telescope. It’s not visible to the naked eye yet, but it will be in a month or so as it grows brighter and brighter. Right now you can see it with binoculars. It’s been officially named Vi405 Cas.

It’s a classical nova, so what we’re seeing is not the star, but the flash of light as it explodes. It’s like watching a thermonuclear bomb go off from a VERY safe distance. A nova can brighten 50,000 to 100,000 times in a matter of hours, but it’s hard to tell how long it will last, so if you have clear skies in your area, you need to get out there now to look for it. Instructions for where to look are at Sky and Telescope.

Note: I haven’t given up on Betelgeuse yet. Last year in January it began to fade rapidly, and scientists thought it might be getting ready to go supernova, but then nothing happened. It brightened again, but not quite back to normal, and scientists are anxiously waiting to see what happens next. According to them, it could explode any time in the next 10,000 years or so, but I’m hoping it does it in my lifetime, even though after it was over, it would mean Orion would be without one shoulder, and we might have to think of another name for the constellation.

The second great piece of news was the announcement that Alan Turing’s picture will be on the new British 50-pound note. They announced it yesterday, and in honor of him, the rainbow flag flew over the Bank of England (will wonders never cease?)

In case you’re unclear on who Turing is, he’s the scientist behind the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. The Nazis’ code was considered unbreakable, and basically was, but Turing came up with a design for bombes which would automatically sort through the hundreds of thousands of possibilities of letter combinations in the coded messages and made it possible to decode the messages. This meant that the Allies had access to all sorts of information about German troop movements and ship locations and plans and gave us a HUGE advantage. This was all done in COMPLETE SECRECY, since if the Germans found out we’d broken the code, they’d simply change the settings, and we’d lose access. Or worse, they’d feed us false information. But because of that secrecy, what he and the other scientists and mathematicians and linguists at Bletchley Park had done was unknown until the records were declassified in the 1970s.

Which meant that in 1952, when he got in trouble, the courts didn’t realize they were charging and convicting the man who had won the war for Britain. To them, he was just a gay man, and in the 1950s, being gay was a serious crime, punished by prison. (Look at what happened to Oscar Wilde, and he was a famous playwright when he was arrested.) Turing was stripped of his security clearance (which made it impossible to do the work he loved), tried for “gross indecency” and given the choice of prison or chemical castration. He chose the latter, but the medications made it impossible for him to work or think, and he committed suicide two years later. A crime had been committed, all right, but it was the British government which had committed it, and putting Turing’s picture on the 50-pound note is obviously in part an act of atonement for what they did to him. “He deserved so much better,” the Governor of the Bank said in his speech.

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But it’s also an attempt to properly honor the man who, in large part, won the war, or if not, then he certainly shortened it by several years (years during which Hitler might have been able to obtain the atomic bomb) and saved millions of lives. He is often called “the man who won the war.”

Turing’s invention of the bombes and other decoding techniques wasn’t his only scientific accomplishment. At age 22, he wrote a brilliant paper which became the basis for the modern computer. Astronomer Adam Frank says, “Turing’s machines are the essence of every device with a chip in it that you have ever encountered. That’s why Turin stands, essentially, at the head of the line when it comes to the creation of the digital age. He is the father of all computers.”

He also did groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence. He invented the Turing Test, a test by which scientists attempt to tell whether they’re talking to a human being or a robot, and he made major strides in studying the mathematics of plants. And all of this by the age of 41. Just think what he could have accomplished if he hadn’t been hounded to death.
Note: If you want to find out more about him and what he did, I highly recommend the movies “The Imitation Game,” a biographical movie about his time at Bletchley Park, and “Enigma,” a fictionalized story about how BP got shut out of the Naval Enigma Code and then got back in again. Both are really good.

Turing was clearly a genius. His fellow workers in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, all of whom were geniuses, too, called him “Prof.” He was also your classic absent-minded professor with lots of eccentricities. He chained his coffee mug to the radiator to keep it from being stolen and wore a gas mask in the spring because he had hay fever. He also had a bike with a chain that kept falling off. Instead of replacing it, he would simply pedal the bike backward until the chain was fixed. He was also a deeply, deeply terrible driver. He had apparently done the math and concluded that the smaller the amount of time a person spent in an intersection, the less the chance of an accident, which meant as he approached a crossroads, he floored it and roared through without looking to either right or left, terrifying the people who had been foolish enough to get in the car with him. (They usually only rode with him once.)

The 50-pound note doesn’t just have Turing’s picture on it, it also has his signature–it’s one taken from the registry book when he signed in at Bletchley Park–a picture of the Enigma machine and the bombes, diagrams from his 1939 paper on computing machines, a green-and-gold foil resembling a computer chip, a diagram of an Automatic Computing Engine Pilot Machine, a ticker tape of binary data, and a spiral sunflower pattern which pays tribute to Turing’s work on morphogenetics.

And there are clues to what the Bank is calling “The Turing Challenge,” a series of coded messages embedded in the 50-pound note that the public can attempt to puzzle out. It was designed by people at GCHQ (the intelligence organization at the heart of Bletchley Park), and they said it will probably take at least seven hours for experts to solve (and the rest of us much longer.) They said it might even stump Alan Turing himself, “though we doubt it.” To try it yourself, google “Turing Challenge,” work out the message, and then enter it into the Enigma keyboard that’s been set up online to see what you’ve done. You don’t need an actual banknote to figure it out. The images are all online.

Having a banknote dedicated to him is a fitting honor for Turing, who along with Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, and the painter J.W. Turner will be on new forgery-proof polymer notes which are supposed to be sturdier than the old paper notes. They have a clear plastic window and a hologram image to prevent forgery. And there’s a quote from Turing that’s totally appropriate:

“This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.”

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Connie Willis will receive the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America during the 2021 Nebula Awards Weekend.   Details on the award and how you can participate in the 2021 Nebula Awards Weekend can be found here. 

Side note on Doomsday Book, the Subterranean Press limited edition of the novel sold out quickly.  It is possible more copies may be made available once shipping has completed later in the year.    Details on the release can be found here.  It is recommended you subscribe to the Subterranean Press email list to get first notification of any availability.

The NoCo Optimist has a recent interview with Connie about Doomsday Book and the pandemic we’ve been going through: ” Renowned science fiction author and Greeley resident, Connie Willis, sees ‘Doomsday Book’ come to life amid pandemic“

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December is going to be just a great month.

Not only will we start to get more light again on the 22nd–Yay!!

But there’s all sorts of neat stuff up in the sky that you should be outside looking at.

First, on the 13th and 14th the Geminid meteor shower occurs.

In Colorado, where I live, it starts around 9 p.m. and goes through 2 a.m.

It occurs because we’re passing through the debris from an asteroid-like object named Phaeton 3200.

There will be between 50 and 150 meteors an hour, and some of them will be brightly colored because of the chemicals burning up in them:

nitrogen and oxygen–red

calcium–purple

iron–orange

magnesium–blue

The best plan is to drive out to somewhere away from the city lights and then either lie down on the ground with your feet pointing south or, if you’re old like me, lean back against the hood of your car or take a lawn chair with you.

It’s supposed to be especially good this year because it coincides with a nearly new moon so the

sky will be nearly dark.

But that’s not the main event.

THAT would be the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter.

A conjunction occurs when two planets appear to come very close in the sky. (They’re not actually anywhere near each other. Saturn and Jupiter are over 400 million miles apart.)

A Great Conjunction happens when the two planets get so close they appear to touch or even form one super-bright star. A conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter occurs every four years, but Great Conjunctions are much rarer. One this bright last occurred in 1623, and Galileo saw it. Kepler was alive then, too, and speculated it might have been the Bethlehem star that the Wise Men saw. “And the star went before them,” would seem to indicate the star was moving, just like the two planets are moving together right now. The Great Conjunction before that was in 1226, so you can see this doesn’t happen every day–or, rather, night.

You can see this one on December 21, but you can also go watch the two planets each night as they move closer together. They’re in the southwest part of the sky along the plane of the ecliptic

(the curved line the planets and the moon follow.) They suggest viewing one hour after dark. And you can see it from your own neighborhood. So go out and look at it, and think about how the last time this happened, Galileo was watching.

And speaking of Galileo, you have to see his classic gravity experiment, done this time not from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but in a giant vacuum tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyeF-_QPSbk…

If the link doesn’t work, go to YouTube and type in “Galileo’s Famous Gravity Experiment–Brian Cox—BBC2” and that should get you to it.

They use a bowling ball and some incredibly light feathers, like egret feathers, and it’s absolutely amazing to watch.